Roger Zelazny: To Spin Is Miracle Cat

Something is rotten,
but Dad’s ghost on the castle wall
is not to be trusted either.
(Remember the stories he used to tell?)
Offhand, I’d say there’s something to do.
But you never know.
Keep your eyes open, your feet on the ground.
If it feels right, don’t do it.
Watch the other players watching.

Riptide and foristan. Tal vez, too. Vielleicht, perhaps.
I sometimes think of stories I have never written …
He has made it through the 470-meter navigable aperture
at the spinning disc-edge of a black hole
equivalent to eight solar masses.
(Clever computer, Anubis-like, to guide him.)
Now, telling the story,
a page from Descent into the Maelstrom,
as he flashes by,
he shows his alien audience
his own ship, this ship,
hanging there, bug-in-web-like,
upon the event horizon.
Grand final image.
(Or would photon-decay do it in?)
Didn’t like it. Not really a story. Hence, nothing.
Except for that damned image …
Watching your own eternal doom. Cracking jokes about it …

One of the great pleasures of mortality, I suppose,
is knowing that others are suffering, too.
And of writing, that others have fragments
that drive them just as mad:
Medusa smiled …
God Owes Me $6.57 …
Itself Surprised …
The Cyborg Connection …
“Send them an Apocalypse Card.”
“Think dead thoughts.”
“You have ten minutes to fall in love.”
The greatest argument I know for sadistic deities
is that inspiration comes in pieces
and some of them never fit.

Objective correlatives are nice things to have about,
but these are untidy scraps that almost make it,
and could, I suppose, correlate
if they tried just a little harder.
But they won’t. After awhile you feel sure.
It is from their species that I learned
the true meaning of love-hate,
a lesson one can usually do without.
Somewhere deep within there may be a message,
but they hung up before I got it.

There should be a divorce-getting,
stake-driving process available,
a rite of exorcism for not-quite-ideas
that simply won’t give up.
Seizing them and strewing them across the ergosphere
may be the only way.
But if they were to make it through
that damned aperture
and return to show me themselves,
bug-like, in the web of forces, waving—
Day of Homeothermy, The Man with the Wooden Heart,
Startangle, Cheeterwing, Chuttle and Pocketstar—
I would …

Bleed upon them, I suppose,
curse, send the tracenfeef, shiddoes and slugell
off to the Quickwind where Dweeble dwells
to struff their guffs where the antiblob
flarts before the Logrus.
Even then, I wonder …
There may be things of which I never shall be free,
immortal as myself, bugging me down ages,
proof against revenge.
My world is crowded and an alien valley.
They sing against the closing of my eyes.

As I watch the billion-nuanced dawn stream
through pages of my brain,
Like Loki screaming back to Asgard
with his hair afire,
I feel I have gotten upon the moment
three monsters which shall destroy the world:

My world, designed of ice,
looped in supple frame, gray,
And pillaring the heavens on furled cloth towers,
as still as the inside of a jewel,
Has shuddered to a sluggish consistency
with the crowing of a cock upon a dunghill;

The steps on a bridge, once broken,
have the hateful rainbow
over my sea-son’s home,
As Hel, my burning daughter,
all wisdom and half-corpse,
Stirs beside me now within the incestuous parabola
of a poorly reconstructed Faust
regretting a beautiful moment;

The sheet of flame has risen,
wall behind me now—
immolating cerement to better time—
As the mechanical ankles
of a man who has sired deity
paraphrase in numbered warmth away
The treading of a Wolf behind the icy sun.

Our Lady of Guadalupe
to thee we pray
Deliver us the living
Bless the souls of our ancestors
writhing in the Great Snake
on outward fits of day

Talk to the silent
Breathe on those without breath
Wreathe in greatnesses of grace
Thy sun-dog and his kin

who move through sand
in winnowings of coral
tide by sand
past apertures of star

Waft on high the mothers of our men
Bless them

who pry careers of molten sun-pearl
the open mouthed clamshells of cloud

It has been said that no land lies so vile
but kingship would console one’s presence there;
no spit of Hell too small
for Lucifer to dwell supreme,
post-fall.

But Lord! the exile autocrat
imprisoned by such reign!
with two-edged sword of Proust
that pricks a will to power
(nettle of reply from out a fading past)—

as here, most lovely Bonaparte,
my master of the rocks,
we dub the bowing, red and cactus head.

Strange, that here I should think of you.
The ashes are not bitter,
nor the dust excessive.
There are no trees
to hold the three small beasts:
fear, shame, and mocking laughter …

but yesterday discomfort
fell back across this path,
sapping seas of innocence
I’d builded a waste:
diminutive dimples of darkness
slashed shadow to prairie dog’s stare:

adjudicant, still angel cast of browness,
preposition to fire, despair …

…machine of day pulling taffy.

Green wrestles yellow on that pillared island,
scuffing occasional brown clods.

Landed by the bullet
the banded angel
breathes orison
her final wing

… perpetual spa of blue
where clouds boil and dip chameleon hue.

And sorely bites the blade
behind Cassandra brows!
Waters mirror murder, fuse
with care-cut faces, darken all
about the chariot of disbelief.

They will not hear the word,
truer than their thousand syllables’
beauty, but bear its black fins
wrapped in nets of apparency
upon their choral back;

and the ever gentle mutter
of cloth about rushing
works wordless concordance
with golden and double doors opened
to blood-struck Agamemon down.

Tripple topped steeples
of brass,
steel,
and I forget what other—
poking with massive
and insect probosci—
suck a passing cloud,
prick to sudden star-wound
night’s most Negro thing …

Ye I salute,
holiest of vampires!
bread of metaphor,
being,
and I know not what,
in many-topped minds
of the minder.